🧵 Thursday Thread: Caramel Rolls Are My Ritual. What's Yours?
Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to. ~Andre Aciman
Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to. ~Andre Aciman
Let’s talk about rituals, because I think we’re going to need them for getting through what’s coming. Mike Norton, a researcher who has studied ritual, says:
“[W]hen we are all facing both actual and anticipated grief, these idiosyncratic rituals can restore our sense of control over our lives. We feel out of control when we experience loss – we didn’t want it to happen, but we couldn’t control it. That is, in and of itself, a very unpleasant feeling, that sense that you’re not in charge of your life. Rituals restore some of that control.”
One of my go-to rituals is baking. Just ask Billie. When times get dark, I turn to pantry. During Covid, I tested so many recipes we could not keep up with my output. We would say—Jon, Billie, Tao, and I—most evenings, “Don’t forget, we have to do our cake work,” which simply meant we had at least two or three cakes to work our way through. You can see just a tiny fraction of my creations in the photos below.
The heart of the ritual, though, lives in the caramel rolls, which are the first not-that-easy thing I learned to bake. And I taught myself to do it because my mom made caramel rolls every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I loved them, and I loved her, even as I feared her. I loved watching her cut through the sugary log of dough with a piece of sewing thread, then place the pinwheel discs into the pan full of brown sugar and butter.
It was magic.
Sharing that magic with my own kids has meant something deep over the decades. My mom doesn’t speak to me, but her caramel rolls do. And every time I make them (also at Thanksgiving and Christmas) there is a great hubbub when I remove them from the oven. Mom made hers in a 9X13 pan, but I make mine in two round pans, and the first ritual (after the stirring and kneading and assembling and thread-cutting and baking, of course) is to judge how smoothly they come out of the pan after “the flip.” The second ritual is to rate one pan against the other. My son, Max, tends to be the noisiest and most enthusiastic participant in these discussions. He really cares about the caramel rolls.
The comfort is not just the pillowy dough and melted sugar. It’s the repetition of something that ties us to all the seasons past, this little patch of repeated time that reminds us in some small way of who we are and have always been, even as everything around us keeps changing.
So, yes, it’s true. Caramel rolls and all of their baked cousins are my ritual.
What are the rituals that you return to year after year? They don’t have to be grounded in any holiday or religion, but they can be, of course. They don’t have to be food-based, either!
Rituals can be simple, complicated, serious, silly, quirky, or anything in betwen. What brings you comfort and the solace of time-tested distraction when the world is hard? What do you turn to as the world turns?
I want to hear about it. Let’s share some solace of ritual together.
Also, I have a favor to ask. I am about to announce the first twelve-week seasonal intensive of 2025, and it’s going to be really special. I’ll say more later, but for now, just know that it is inspired by Ross Gay’s Book of Delights. To those who wanted to write the body, fear not, that will come, too. But for January, delight. And joy. Which is never thin. As Gay himself said, in an interview called Dining With Sorrow:
Joy, I think, often, in the practices of entanglement, often comes because we're devastated. And sorrow is part of it.
I’m really looking forward to offering this salve of a curriculum.
And the favor is this: if you have enjoyed/learned from/grown from/been changed by a WITD intensive, I would love to hear from you so that I can share your quote when I announce the Joy intensive. You can email writing@writinginthedark.org or share a comment, whatever works for you. And thank you so much in advance.
Now, for rituals. What are yours?
Love,
Jeannine
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